SUBMITTED BY ARTHUR N1ORC - AMST A/C #31468
FEATURE
14th Station Crew to Launch from Baikonur
09.13.06
Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and Cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin of the 14th
International Space Station crew are scheduled to launch from the
Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan a few minutes after midnight EDT on
Sept. 18 to begin a six-month stay in space.
With them will be American Anousheh Ansari, the first female spaceflight
participant to visit the orbiting laboratory. She is flying under
contract with the Russian Federal Space Agency.
She will return to Earth with the Expedition 13 crew, Commander Pavel
Vinogradov and NASA Science Officer Jeff Williams, on Sept. 28.
Expedition 13 launched to the station on March 30.
After its 12:09 a.m. launch Sept. 18, Expedition 14's Soyuz TMA
spacecraft is scheduled to dock at the station at 1:28 a.m. on Sept. 20.
There they will be greeted by their third Expedition 14 crew member,
European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Reiter of Germany. Reiter arrived
at the station aboard Discovery on the STS-121 mission in July. He
joined Expedition 13, bringing the number of station crew members to
three for the first time since May 2003.
Lopez-Alegria, 45, will be making his fourth flight into space. He flew
three space shuttle missions. On Expedition 14, he also will serve as
NASA science officer.
Tyurin, 46, is making his second spaceflight. He served as a member of
the station's Expedition 3 crew in 2001, which launched in August and
landed in December. He is the second long-duration crew member to be
assigned to a second expedition. Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was a member
of the Expedition 1 and Expedition 11 station crews.
Reiter is the first European Space Agency astronaut to server as a
long-duration International Space Station crew member. His presence for
the first part of Expedition 14 will be valuable for his new crewmates
because of his knowledge of the station and its systems. Previous
oncoming crews have relied on intense handovers of just over a week with
the predecessor crew members before taking over station operations
themselves.
Reiter, who served as a crew member on the Russian space station Mir for
six months in 1995, is scheduled to return to Earth aboard Discovery on
STS-116 in December.
Discovery will bring Astronaut Sunita Williams to the station to replace
Reiter and join Expedition 14 in progress. Williams, 41, a Navy
commander, will be making her first spaceflight. She is scheduled to
remain on the station until next spring.
Discovery also will bring the P5 truss to the station. While it is
docked, station and shuttle crews will reconfigure the orbiting
laboratory's electrical system and activate the new solar arrays brought
up by Atlantis on STS-115.
Expedition 14 will do as many as four spacewalks, perhaps three in
January in U.S. spacesuits, to reconfigure the station's permanent
cooling system. The other would be done earlier in Russian spacesuits to
retrieve and install experiments.
Two Expedition 15 crew members are expected to arrive next spring to
replace Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin.